The rocking chair

Conceptually a rocking chair is a wonderful thing. Moving back and forward while remaining in a fixed place let you and me burn off some nervous energy or exercise nervous ticks, while resting weary-ah so weary, bones and cartilage. But once in America it was more. A chair on the porch used to be the access point to the only social network that counted your neighbors. 

Once the rocking chair on your front porch is where you saw what was going on. On a warm clear evening one neighbor would walk across the street to ask if you knew about Frank. He just had a heart attack you know and is in hospital. Some other neighbor’s child flush with new money from a recently acquired factory job would blow by squealing tires in a tricked out ride. You made a mental note to watch that one.

You could see who passed by and try and sort out why a particular regular did not pass by. You could talk to other neighbors if you had business with them. You got connected.

The thing is that sitting on a chair looking in a passing neighbor’s eye and shaking their hand sort of gave you a measure of the person. You were able to pick up on who they really were as opposed to a digital media image that they nowadays paint of themselves.

In America we have gotten too busy in our race to the bottom of life to sit outside or the corollary to stroll around our neighborhoods on a regular basis anymore. We have Facebook, Twitter and television to suck us indoors and away from the art of conversation and the real connections we used to make face to face. We have become slaves to narrowing margins of time dictated by unrealistic work expectations, program start times on the tube and kid’s soccer, music and hockey schedules.

God I love the image of this chair. Ah but my heart sinks because it does not mean what it used to mean. It is as meaningless as a painted milk can on the front porch. Both of them are old, out of date and merely curiosities.

The questions we really have to ask is why we have allowed thismove indoors away from community to happen and who will lead us back out into a human society.  Technology brings changes in our life and will always bring changes. 

A student of history will tell you about the complete and utter upheaval in society following the start of the industrial revolution.  Shifting work patterns, human as machine components made daily life very negative.  Long hours, low wages and family disruption were the norm. Read some stories of practices in New England textile mills and you will say “Thank God the unions came along.” We are lucky trade unionism rose up to challenge the long hours and intolerable conditions that so quickly became the norm in the late 1800s to early 1900s.  

But what group will arise to help us return to a face to face society?

What has occurred now is pernicious.  We as a people have allowed bread and circuses (panem et circenses) to isolate us and divert us from community and responsibility.  The panem term was supposedly coined by Juvenal. He was trying to describe the cynical formula used by the Roman emperors to keep masses content.  Give us ample food (a pizza is just a couple of mouse clicks away) and entertainment (Lip Sync battle anyone?) and people lose sight of the importance of staying engaged, staying in real contract, staying informed and staying on a handshake level with other humans. Bellies full and minds diverted we become oblivious sheep.

I don’t know I am just ranting but we are the most electronically connected but socially isolated group ever and it can’t go on like this.

 

 

 

Solitary walking.

The bitter and lucid joys of solitude. The real desert is this: to face the real limitations of one’s own existence and knowledge and not try to manipulate them or disguise them. Not to embellish them with possibilities. Simply to set aside all possibilities other than those which are actually present and real, here and now. And then to choose or not, as one wishes, knowing that no choice is a solution to anything, but merely a step further into a slightly changed context of other, very few, very limited, very meaningless concrete possibilities. To realize that one’s whole life, everybody’s life, is really like that. In society the possibilities seem infinitely extended. One is in contact with other people, other liberties, other choices, and who knows what the others may suddenly all choose?

In society, in the middle of other people, one can always imagine one will break through into other liberties and other frames of reference. Other worlds. We have trained ourselves to think that we live at every moment amid unlimited hopes. There is nothing we cannot have if we try hard enough, or look in the right place for it.

But in solitude, when accurate limitations are seen and accepted, they then vanish, and new dimensions open up. The present is in fact, in itself, unlimited. The only way to grasp it in its unlimited-ness is to remove the limitations we place on it by future expectations and hopes and plans, or surmises, or regrets about the past, or attempts to explain something we have experienced (or the revived, warmed-up experience) in order to be able to continue living with it.

Thomas Merton June 19, 1966,VI. 309–10

Lions at the Door

When I was younger I was extremely gregarious. I think it came from the years of my growing up when I was overweight, had horned rim glasses (wire rims were the rage), wore my brother’s hand me down clothing and had the twin curses of acne and braces. Being outgoing was a way I overcame years of isolation.  With grand gestures I tried to reach out from my isolation.

 

Now I am a little more reserved.  Trust me I have not gone into a shell or anything but I have backed away from the “Hey everybody” and the outrageous speech and acts to draw others in.  Maybe it is maturity.  Maybe it is aging.

 

These days I find myself drawn more and more to things than to people.  I am not talking about toys like sport cars and Apple watches. I am drawn more to things we imperfect beings craft artfully into images of beauty.  Topiary, formal gardens, the odd piece of sculpture in a yard, these are the things I am finding my gaze resting on.  This lust for beauty might be the reason I am so attached to my iPhone.  By taking pictures and manipulating images I am letting an artistic stream follow a path. 

 

It is not an hourglass where the pursuit of beauty steals sand from my personality.  It is more a shifting of the shoreline on a beach somewhere.

Moon In the Dew

Sometimes out of the corner of your eye you catch something real. What hits the back of your eyeball setting off the rods and cones may be so small as to seem insignificant. However as people in dry and arid places know a drop of moisture in the early morning hours reflects life back into the world. The moon can exist in a dewdrop as Master Dogen said.

Remember Me

Two real reasons exist why footprints like these are left imprinted in a sidewalk.  The first is that someone did not notice or was not aware of the recent pour.  Perhaps the day was rain soaked and they did not want to walk in the water filled gutter or on the tired macadam surface next to the sidewalk.  It happens. 

The other reason is that because perhaps jokingly or even unthinking the trespasser stepping into the unset surface wanted to be remembered.  Instead of carving a name and a year this trekker made a bold statement one that says I was dominant here remember me.  Those tennis shoeprints say things like “think about me and the reasons why I did this”. 

For a time the unknown strider will have a little piece of immortality.  His time will be short.  His permanence is fleeting.  Unless some Midwestern volcano erupts preserving the sidewalk in ash to be discovered in another 2000 years by those following us, that aggregate will succumb to water and wind in less than 100 years.  More likely it will succumb to a site plan revision in less than 20 cycles around the sun.

If the creator of those footprints wasn’t just in a hurry on a rainy day oblivious to the plastic sheeting on this route, he would have been better served by writing a poem.  Mr. Neruda will probably still be studied in a 100 years.  The sidewalk will be crushed up and perhaps used again.  Words win out over all but a few of the plastic arts. Yes this is a nod to the cave of Altamira.

 

If You Forget Me

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

Into the Woods with Robin - The Joy of a Damn Good Book

Often I tend to assume everyone had similar experiences to me growing up.  Intellectually I know that is not true.  However I am sure there are some commonalities of the lives lived among the people I have as my friendship circle.

One experience that seems to me would have to be a shared one is that moment when you discovered you loved reading.  Lawyers, advertising gurus, bureaucrats, political operatives, college instructors these are all callings, these are all professions that require you read capably. You only come to capable reading by doing copious amounts of it.  And you only get the skills to read like that was because once a singular book caught your attention. The words within that leather or cloth bound binding sucked you into the joys of discovering a good story.

When I was looking for illustrations for my last post I came upon an image from The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood.  Immediately as I looked at it I was transported back to the third grade. There I was at that exact moment when Miss Gleason had allowed me to take a copy of that old chestnut home with me. Once opened the book the words and graphics transported me to a different place and time.  The people around me ceased to be.  Suddenly by following those black lines strung together into words and sentences I was in medieval England just after the Norman Conquest.  Lush and verdant was the hardwood forest known as Sherwood.

Scenes from that book have stayed with me, like Littlejohn and Robin Hood fighting with staffs on the log.  And then there was Robin being carried across the river on Friar Tuck’s back. These were just delightful scenes to me. What images I have come from my imagination and not the Errol Flynn movie.  Having read the Merry Adventures the movie felt flat for me.  It was not the story my imagination had told me as I read the book.

Working my way through the book I would linger on the illustrations.  I would add so much into the story from what I imagined had been said and done in the moments before and after the one captured in the illustration.  The images I found online today sparked my imagination and threw me back into that book.

When I reached the end of the book I was crestfallen.  As Robin betrayed and beaten pulls on his bow to send his arrow into the wood to mark his burial place I was as sad as a third grader could be. But the book was a whole, it was a joyful narrative. My sadness to not stop me from going back to read it again and again.  One book sent me on the search for more books that would feel like that, complete and whole. 

Many books try to tell a complete story.  Few do it well.  The Sound of Waves by Mishima is one.  The Demon in the Freezer is another.  Good Bye Mr. Chips is a third.  But this is not what matters, what matters is that we all opened a book at some point in our lives and were entranced, enthralled and taken. 

In recent weeks I have been making it a point to get at least a book a week from the library.  I have been reading fantasy novels, contemporary novels and tales of social injustice.  Some of the reads have been fluffy and quick and some it has pained me to think about what would be on the next page.  But I will not stop reading again because there is a joy in the words.

When I look at the illustration above I see the loss and melancholy of a hero.  Without books so much of human experience would not be within my imagination.

Before You Whine at me About the Actual Syle of the House Please Note I am not a Scholar of Housing Syles

Someone was trying to make a proclamation with this roof. For my money the statement was made. Me, I can’t tell who decided to make the statement or why they made the statement but clearly this is not a form follows function situation.

I am assuming this house was constructed at least sixty years ago. Given the neo-Tudor elements someone, be it the architect or the owner, was taken with the images of Elizabethan England. Did it come from a NC Wyeth illustration of a book like Robin Hood or Men of Iron? Or perhaps given the nature of the neighborhood the original owner had travelled to England as a professor and was taken by the eye catching nature of the style.

On the other hand the owner may have not be the person with the inspiration. Maybe this came from the builder having seen this as a developing trend. There are other Tudor or neo-Tudor residences in the community. Perhaps the builder or architect pitched this place and its unique roof as a statement home. I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. I just know that when you get out of a car and walk through a neighborhood you sense a great deal more about the place.